trump campaign have any contact with russians trying to meddle with the election? absolutely not. and i discussed that with the president-elect just last night. those conversations never happened. i hear people saying it like it s a fact on television. that is just not only inaccurate and false, but it s dangerous. david, inaccurate, false, dangerous. now we have the son of the president of the united states saying, oh, yeah, i did that. how big a problem could this be? i mean, the meeting in and of itself and the details that are coming out are bad enough. but then the changing stories by the president s son just within the space of less than 24 hours makes it look like they re trying to hide something. this continues to be a problem. we know that on the other meetings that have been reported by campaign surrogates, including jeff sessions, mike flynn, not all have been disclosed and even jared kushner ahead of time and only in retrospect are they saying, okay, this happened, bu
msnbc legal analyst, as well as the author of the forthcoming book, choke hold about police tactics and minority rights. peter, giver us the latest. what are the white house and donald trump jr. saying about this? reporter: we ll be hearing from the white house. sara huckabee sanders expected to step inside the podium an hour from now. it will be off-camera so only audio will be provided. and that s where we will get sort of the official line as it were from the white house. but we are now hearing from donald trump jr. with a series of tweets, sort of trying to defend himself. he s already the fierce defender of his father, and now he wrote, obviously, i m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent. went nowhere, but had to listen. he adds, and this is important. he writes, no inconsistency in statements, is his argument. meeting ended up primarily being about adoptions in response to further questions. i simply provided more detail.
what happened in that meeting has shifted over time. now, as of march, the president s son denied ever meeting with any russians as a representative of the campaign. then after that first-time story came out on saturday, trump jr. said, well, he did meet with a russian lawyer, but it was, twoet, primarily about adoptions, no mention of anything else. the russians froze adoptions to the u.s. after the u.s. issued sanctions in 2012 regarding human rights violations. then trump jr. changed his story again after the second story by the times. now he says he met with the lawyer after she claimed to have damaging information about hillary clinton. so let s start with our reporters and analysts. peter alexander is at the white house. david nakamura, a reporter with the washington post. an anchor with yahoo! news. michael crowley, senior foreign affairs correspondent with politico. and paul butler, a professor at georgetown school of law and at
election, or whether the president just took putin s word for it with regards to this latest development. best case scenario, you could say this administration was very naive in thinking they could be duped. and we re talking about the highest level ofs of participants and people surrounding this president, his campaign chairman being duped into having a meeting with somebody about scoop and dirt on hillary clinton, only to obviously have that meeting be really about the magnitski act. michael, you re a senior foreign affairs correspondent. tell us about the russian connection. who are these people? how significant is it, just by virtue of who was involved? well, what you have is a lawyer who has ties to the kremlin. she is not actually a russian official. so when so i don t think this directly contradicts any trump campaign statements that they didn t meet with russian officials who were trying to meddle in the election.